382 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that this part can be attributed to Mill. In this respect he is to be 

 strongly contrasted with the great majority of writers on political 

 economy, who, on the strength, perhaps, of a verbal correction, or an 

 unimportant qualification, of a received doctrine, if not on the score 

 of a pure fallacy, would fain persuade us that they have achieved a 

 revolution in economic doctrine, and that the entire science must be 

 rebuilt from its foundation in conformity with their scheme. This sort 

 of thing has done infinite mischief to the progress of economic science ; 

 and one of Mill's great merits is that both by example and by precept 

 he steadily discountenanced it. His anxiety to afiiliate his own spec- 

 ulations to those of his predecessors is a marked feature in all his phil- 

 osophical works, and illustrates at once the modesty and comprehen- 

 siveness of his mind. 



On some points, however, and these points of supreme importance, 

 the contributions of Mill to economic science are very much more than 

 developments even though we understand that term in its largest 

 sense of any previous writer. No one can have studied political 

 economy in the works of its earlier cultivators without being struck 

 with the dreariness of the outlook which, in the main, it discloses for 

 the human race. It seems to have been Ricardo's deliberate opinion 

 that a substantial improvement in the condition of the mass of man- 

 kind was impossible. He considered it as the normal state of things 

 that wages should be at the minimum requisite to support the laborer 

 in physical health and strength, and to enable him to bring up a family 

 large enough to supply the wants of the labor-market. A temporary 

 improvement, indeed, as the consequence of expanding commerce and 

 growing capital, he saw that there might be ; but he held that the 

 force of the principle of population was always powerful enough so to 

 augment the supply of labor as to bring wages ever again down to the 

 minimum point. So completely had this belief become a fixed idea 

 in Ricardo's mind, that he confidently drew from it the consequence 

 that in no case could taxation fall on the laborer, since living, as a 

 normal state of things, on the lowest possible stipend adequate to 

 maintain him and his family he would inevitably, he argued, transfer 

 the burden to his employer, and a tax, nominally on wages, would, in 

 the result, become invariably a tax upon profits. On this point Mill's 

 doctrine leads to conclusions directly opposed to Ricardo's, and to 

 those of most preceding economists. And it will illustrate his posi- 

 tion, as a thinker, in relation to them, if we note how this result was 

 obtained. Mill neither denied the premises nor disputed the logic of 

 Ricardo's argument : he accepted both ; and in particular he recog- 

 nized fully the force of the principle of population ; but he took ac- 

 count of a further premiss which Ricardo had overlooked, and which, 

 duly weighed, led to a reversal of Ricardo's conclusion. The minimum 

 of wages, even such as it exists in the case of the worst-paid laborer, 

 is not the very least sum that human nature can subsist upon ; it is 



